Case studies

Below are some examples of how Benchmark Performance has transformed its clients' I.T. systems, producing real business benefits:

Inmarsat Limited (the International Maritime Satellite Organisation) needed to upgrade its corporate data warehouse. Benchmark Performance specified, installed and configured a new warehouse server consisting of a hybrid cluster pair of Alphaserver ES40 and ES45 attached to an HSG80 SAN controllers supporting over 1TB of storage. The front end uses Brio while the backend database uses Oracle 8.1.6 now migrated to 8.1.7. Inmarsat's warehouse is mission critical as it holds commissioning and billing data for all traffic over Inmarsat's satellites and provides quasi real time updates to the cubes using replication from the billing system. As the server has been very successful, vastly outperforming the previous warehouse, Inmarsat has asked us to conduct tests for 9.2.0.1 with a migration planned early in 2003.

Acco plc is the leading maker of office products holding brands such as Rexel and Twinlock. Its European operations are mostly run using the Baan ERP suite though a few sites still use legacy systems (IMPCON, SOP) running on RDB. Benchmark built its European datawarehouse on an ES40 using the last of the generation of SCSI attached storage (HSZ80). This project is notable because of the large amount of optimisation that we carried out to fit monthly and daily builds during the allowed time windows. It is the only project where we were able to outperform a simple SAME architecture (Stripe And Mirror Everything) by using a carefully designed database on hardware mirrored individual disks. The database in this project was Informix.

KPMG asked Benchmark to configure a data warehouse for a client consisting of a pair of Alphaserver ES40s running Oracle. The client is a leading Internet micropayments company. Benchmark worked alongside KPMG to translate their business specifications for the warehouse into the physical and logical design of the warehouse. Because of limitations of the schema of the OLTP source system, this warehouse was only able to offer nightly updates. Front end cube building and drilling down was carried out using Broadbase - specified by the end client.

Benchmark won the open tender in 2000 for the migration of the ESAS commissioning system VMS to Tru64 server migration at Inmarsat Limited. The project involved the migration of scripts, libraries and programs from one operating system to the other as well as the database migration from Oracle 7.1.3 to Oracle 8i. This project was awarded at fixed price and was completed successfully and on time. This migration was absolutely mission critical for Inmarsat as the much larger project for web-enabling the front-end (ESAS2000) depended on using an Oracle 8 feature (Advanced Replication) between the back-end server and the web. Once the port was complete Benchmark was awarded the contract for the specification, procurement and implementation of the new servers as well as the project to cut-over to them. ESAS data is sent to many Inmarsat customers round the world who use it in their own systems: Land-Earth Stations (LESO) in particular. Because of this, a rollback from an unsuccessful cut-over would have been extremely difficult. It was crucial, therefore, that the migration be accurate and rapid. The project was very successful and the careful specification of the servers we carried out means that they now comfortably support 3-legged advanced replication to two external websites as well as snapshot replication internally to other servers on the Inmarsat LAN. This is a considerably higher load than had been specified in the Inmarsat RFP at the time. This database is extremely important as it holds all the distress and safety at sea information of maritime traffic and we currently hold the out-of-hours support contract for ESAS.

Benchmark configured a SAP cluster and SAN for Norton Healthcare that went live in the Spring of 2001. It consisted of a pair of Alphaserver ES40s running SAP over Oracle as well as additional Alphaserver DS20s as SAP application servers. The cluster was supported by an HSG80-based SAN mirrored between two sites. The cluster and the storage were set up in such a way that the full SAP service could survive the total loss of one site. As the cluster supported several other remote sites and ran the entire business for Norton Healthcare it was absolutely mission-critical. The configuration uses Tru64 5.1 and HSG80s with multibus failover.

Coconut.com is an internet company running Intermail software to provide webmail access to the public and corporate clients. Intermail is an Oracle 8i application which stores email in the filesystem and data pointers in an Oracle database and is the leader in WebMail applications. Benchmark configured Coconut's ASP Clusters and SAN. The configuration was huge though slightly old fashioned due to software constraints. TheTru64 4.0F clusters did not support multibus failover and therefore needed special care when attaching to a Fibre-based SAN. The project consisted of 22 Alphaservers split in several TruClusters, with a total configured storage of 2.5TB, fully mirrored. In this case, the mirroring was local and not between sites.

Accucard.com is part of a new breed of web-based credit card companies which allow full account management of customer credit cards over the Web. Accucard provides backend infrastructure to a number of credit card providers which then concentrate solely on the branding - Stelios Haji-Ioannou's EasyCard is possibly the best known. Benchmark configured the Accucard data warehouse on a clustered pair of Alphaserver ES40 supported by an HSG80 SAN. The disk layout consisted of a combination of faster and slower disks to optimise the price/performance of the configuration. Oracle Advanced Replication was used to feed the data warehouse from the live OLTP systems while, concurrently providing a ready-made database for Disaster Recovery.